TechSomething

FASTBOOT “TOO OLD” AND “ERROR CANNOT GENERATE IMAGE FOR USERDATA”

When you try to install a factory image on a newer Android device (in my case a Google Pixel “1”), you might encounter this error which i sude to the android platform tools which are too old.

Resolution:
download the newer platform-tools from https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/platform-tools

Decompress them with:

unzip platform-tools_r28.0.2-linux.zip

a new platform-tools folder will be created
then in your folder where you have unzipped the factory default edit flash-all.sh and add this line on top:

export PATH=/home/YOURUSER/Downloads/platform-tools:$PATH

in this way the script will search for executables in that folder, using the newer ones.